Pielke on Climate #10

Welcome to issue #10 of my occasional newsletter on climate and energy issues. As a reminder, my day-to-day research or writing is focused on sports governance and various issues of science policy. But I’ve written a fair bit on the topics of climate and energy over the past 25 years, including two recent books and a boatload of academic papers, and I’m paying attention.

So caveat lector!

A few things to say up front:

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With that . . .

Talk on “Extreme Weather and Extreme Politics”

Earlier this month I gave a talk at the University of Minnesota.

It was my first public talk on climate since being “investigated” by Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) in 2015.

It is also the first and only invitation I’ve received to give a public talk on climate at a US university since 2015.

Two weeks later Dr. Holdren was asked about these statements by Senator Jeff Sessions before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, the same committee that I had testified before the previous July.

After some sparring on what Dr. Holdren said or didn’t say a few week previous, Senator Sessions said:

“Well, let me tell you what Dr. Pilkey (sic) said, who sat in that chair you are sitting in today just a few months ago, he is a climate impact expert, and he agrees that warming is partly caused by human emissions. But he testified “It is misleading and just plain incorrect to claim that disasters associated with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods or droughts have increased on climate change time scales either in the United States or globally.”

Holdren replied with a delegitmization effort, saying that I was

“not representative of the mainstream scientific opinion on this point. And again, I will be happy to submit for the record recent articles from Nature, Nature GeoScience, Nature Climate Change, Science and others showing that in drought-prone regions droughts are becoming more intense.”

Of course, Holdren was incorrect.

My views are 100% consistent with those of the IPCC, the very definition of “mainstream scientific opinion.”

Holdren promised to submit scientific evidence for the hearing record in support of his views, Sessions said he looked forward to it.

Three days later Holdren’s missive about me was posted on the White House website, titled Drought and Global Climate Change: An Analysis of Statements by Roger Pielke Jr ” (here in PDF).

Holdren singled out just 2 statements that I had made in my testimony:

“It is misleading, and just plain incorrect, to claim that disasters associated with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods or droughts have increased on climate timescales either in the United States or globally.”

Drought has “for the most part, become shorter, less, frequent, and cover a smaller portion of the U.S. over the last century”. Globally, “there has been little change in drought over the past 60 years.”

The quotes in blue above are from the US National Climate Assessment (former) and a Nature paper (latter) on global drought trends.

Holdren explained his objections:

“I replied that the indicated comments by Dr. Pielke … were not representative of mainstream views on this topic in the climate-science community; and I promised to provide for the record a more complete response with relevant scientific references. “

The slide below shows the entirety of my discussion of drought in my 2013 Senate testimony, which consisted only of quotes from the IPCC, the US CCSP and an image from the CCSP report.

Holdren did not mention hurricanes, floods or tornadoes in his 6 pages of response.

Holdren’s response blew up the internet (or at least the tiny part of it involving issues related to climate).

When the White House posts 6 pages about you, it gets noticed.

For my part, in response wrote a blog response which you can read here.

In that post I noted:

“It is fine for experts to openly disagree. But when a political appointee uses his position not just to disagree on science or policy but to seek to delegitimize a colleague, he has gone too far.”

This was, as far as I am aware, the first time that a Science Advisor to the US President used his platform to seek to delegitimize an academic with whom he disagreed.

I am aware of no such comparable use of the authority and reach of the White House against a researcher.

The fact that I was singled out by the president’s science advisor was not reported on or commented on by the mainstream scientific media. Leading scientific organizations said nothing.

I found this pretty amazing, but c’est la vie.

If John Marburger, say, had gone after James Hansen, it’d have been a story.

None of this mattered, I quickly learned that a lone academic is no match for the bully pulpit that is the White House and the powerful echo chamber of the online climate debate.

A few weeks later the campaign to have me removed as a writer for 538 was underway and 11 months later the investigation motivated by Rep. Raul Grijlava (D-AZ), which he indicated was the result of Holdren’s missive, was launched.

One of my close colleagues said to me at the time: “I’d love to come to your defense, but I don’t want them coming after me.”

Fair enough.

Let’s quickly take a look at the state of the science in 2018 on drought.

The 2017 US National Climate Assessment, prepared under the direction of John Holdren in the last months of the Obama Administration and released after Donald Trump became president concluded the following about drought:

“drought statistics over the entire CONUS have declined … no detectable change in meteorological drought at the global scale”

“Western North America was noted as a region where determining if observed recent droughts were unusual compared to natural variability was particularly difficult.”